My Life and Times

Detail of the Ferrari
F1 > Barcelona April testing, 2005-04-07 (Circuit de Catalunya): Day 3
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Kimi Raikkonen
F1 > Barcelona April testing, 2005-04-07 (Circuit de Catalunya): Day 3
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David Coulthard
F1 > Barcelona April testing, 2005-04-07 (Circuit de Catalunya): Day 3
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Jarno Trulli
F1 > Barcelona April testing, 2005-04-07 (Circuit de Catalunya): Day 3
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San Marino GP: Ferrari preview
Racing series F1
Date 2005-04-20

Not so many years ago, the first races of the season, outside Europe, usually in North and South America or South Africa, were considered nothing more than an 'hors d'oeuvre,' or given that Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro is an Italian team, an 'anti-pasta' to the season proper. The championship only really got underway when the teams returned to Europe and the San Marino Grand Prix.

However, today, the pace of technical development is so frenetic that every race is an equally important opportunity to score points and no team can allow itself the luxury of cruising through the first few rounds of the series. Nevertheless, there will still be a sense of a new beginning, when the teams arrive at the Dino e Enzo Ferrari circuit for Round 4 of the championship.

For a start, it marks the start of the first run of four European races and that means a more conventional paddock, with team trucks and motorhomes making their seasonal debut, cooler conditions than we have seen so far and a much more crowded old-fashioned paddock, with many F1 people making their first appearance of the year.

Certainly Ferrari will be hoping that this weekend represents a new beginning, after a somewhat disappointing start to the season, with just one podium finish so far, courtesy of Rubens Barrichello's second place in the Australian Grand Prix. "Arriving in Imola not leading the world championship, as was the case two years is an extra reason to tackle this race in a positive frame of mind," said the Scuderia's sporting director, Stefano Domenicali.

"I think that after such a start to the season, for a team like ours, the motivation will be stronger than ever. It will be even more important to show all our fans that we are still fighting. Our approach to the San Marino Grand Prix is based on the principal that our objectives and our goals have not changed. This applies to all the races, but of course Imola is a big event for us."

As the nearest venue to the Ferrari factory in Maranello, one would expect massive support for the Reds, however that has not always been the case over the past couple of years. "Unfortunately two years ago the crowd was the lowest in terms of numbers and I should know, because I have been going to Imola for years since I was a child to watch Formula 1, motorbikes and all sorts of race meetings," lamented Domenicali. "It was probably because the race was over the Easter weekend. Last year was better and I hope this year the public will respond and come to support us with flags everywhere to give us a boost."

With the F2005 car still in its infancy, Domenicali reckons there will be other advantages apart from local support in racing near the factory. "For sure, having raced the new car for the first time in Bahrain and then tested with it over a couple of weeks before Imola, there will be movement between the track and our factory. This is an advantage we will have from being so close to the track and we will need to make the most of it."

That pre-Imola testing the sporting director refers to has certainly been intensive, with the two race drivers and both testers hard at work at three circuits; Barcelona, Mugello and Fiorano. "We could have tested at Imola itself, as there is no current testing agreement in place," revealed Domenicali.

"Although we have a different approach to the testing agreement, we opted not to run at Imola as we respect the principle of not testing at a grand prix venue just prior to the race. That is our decision. We want to respect the idea we set with the other teams."

Schumacher and Barrichello will be using the same engines they had in Bahrain and this new engine rule presents an interesting learning curve for Ferrari and the other teams. "In Bahrain, the climate and track conditions meant the engine was stressed a lot," said Domenicali.

"We had to save the engine as much as possible, because Imola is another circuit which is tough on engines, especially in terms of delivering the power in the right way to punch out of the corners, as the track layout is quite stop-start with all the chicanes and you need good traction after braking very heavily for these corners. With this new two race engine rule, we have all had to adopt a new approach."

"We plan to use an engine in terms of the laps we have to do. The more the season progresses, the more we learn and that means we will be able to apply this knowledge to our engine utilisation strategy. We don't divide engine useage equally between two races. It depends on the characteristics of the two tracks. Some races might put an equal stress, others put more stress on the first or second race of an engine's life, so it is a question of balance."

There will be a large Ferrari presence at Imola. "For our home grand prix, as usual we will have our own grandstand for all our staff at the exit to the Rivazza corner," revealed Domenicali. "We are bringing around 1300 people every day and this is a great motivation for them, as they live the spirit of the grand prix weekend. Secondly, we will have people in the pits and garage who do not usually come to races."

"Mechanics and engineers will be brought along to Imola to experience our approach to a race. It gives them a chance to see how the race team operates, but equally importantly, they might be able to bring some of their own work methods to bear on what we do. It is important not to take a narrow view on how we work at the track, but to be open to new suggestions. These people might have a different method which is worth considering and we have to record everything that goes on."

On a personal level, this weekend is a special occasion, as Imola is his home town. "It really is my home grand prix and so it is a very important weekend for me. I meet up with a lot of friends as it's my home. I even cycle into the track every morning from my home, which makes a nice change from staying in a hotel. Friends used to ask me for tickets, but they seem to have got the message and, as it is so hard to get passes, my answer unfortunately is always in the negative!"
 

Larry W. Smith for The New York Times

Regina Bonny, a survivor, kneeling at the chair memorializing a co-worker, Carrie Ann Lenz, who was five months pregnant when she was killed
10 Years After Bombing, Oklahoma City Remembers
By JOHN KIFNER

OKLAHOMA CITY, April 19 - "Did you see all the pretty flowers on our girl's chair?" Doris Needham asked the half-dozen relatives clustered around the memorial to her daughter, Rebecca Anderson, piled high with eight colorful bouquets, a potted plant, a snow globe with an angel and, almost inevitably, a teddy bear.

Ms. Anderson is particularly honored here as the heroic nurse who rushed into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to give aid moments after a truck bomb exploded 10 years ago Tuesday. She was almost immediately killed by falling debris, becoming one of the 168 fatalities.

All around the sloping lawn that is the centerpiece of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, families, friends and survivors, along with rescue workers who had experienced the pain of that terrible day, were gathered around the 168 bronze and glass chairs -19 of them small, for the children killed in the explosion - sharing sorrow, a sense of bonding and, many said, hope for the future.

There were more formal, choreographed ceremonies, including speeches by Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton and other political dignitaries. But the day really belonged to the people who gathered among the chairs, heaping them with flowers, wreaths, pictures and whimsical balloons to remember their loved ones. It was a mixture of wake and family reunion.

A crowd gathered around the chair marked for Lanny L. Scroggins, 46, an accountant in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with most of the attention focused on his granddaughter, Kaleigh, just over a year old, dressed in a frilly party dress and held aloft for photographs by her father - Lanny's son - Brad. Pictures of the little girl filled the chair.

Janice Smith, Lanny Scroggins's older sister by 10 years, recalled how he had graduated from high school in Hughes County, fought and was wounded in Vietnam, finished college in accounting, married Cheryl Parker and had two sons. A friend, David Burkett, helped get him his job in the Federal Building, which he worked at for 23 years. Mr. Burkett, 47, was killed too; wreaths adorned his picture on the cyclone fence that is part of the memorial.

"He has a brother down in Holdenville, Larry, who hasn't come here," Mrs. Smith said. "He can't take it all in; it's too much for him."

Carrie Ann Lenz, 26, was showing sonogram pictures of her expected baby, five months along, to her colleagues in the Drug Enforcement Administration when the blast struck, Glenn and Jolene Short, friends from the Draper Park Christian Church, recalled. The name Michael James Lenz III is also etched on the frosted glass of her chair.

Like many in this deeply religious, largely Protestant, community, the Shorts spoke of the power of faith, saying that Ms. Lenz's mother, Doris Jones, had never lost hers. Like many others here, she went to New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to help console families.

At one chair, a woman knelt by herself, crying, oblivious to the television cameras clustered around her. By contrast, the gathering for LaKesha R. Levy, a 21-year-old who had gone to the building that morning to get a Social Security card, was almost raucous. A bus brought 53 people to the ceremony; they wore T-shirts with her picture and jostled loudly for group photographs at her chair.

Almost unnoticed were Hans and Torrey Butzer, the American-born couple practicing architecture in Germany who designed the memorial along with Sven Berg.

"We are so happy," Ms. Butzer said. "It is so wonderful to see people find comfort, to find some kind of peace. You don't want to spoon-feed people your idea, but the empty chairs to us is a gentle way to think of the people we lost."

She was rewarded a moment later, when Steve Powell, who directed rescue dogs at the site, said: "You guys did a wonderful job. It's a kind of humble way to honor those, it's very respectful."

"This is really the 23rd Psalm," Mr. Powell said of the memorial. " 'The Lord leadeth me to lie down by still waters' - and this is the valley of death."

The formal ceremonies began with about 1,600 people in the nearby United Methodist Church, which had been damaged by the blast. At 9:02 a.m. - the moment the bomb struck - the crowd observed 168 seconds of silence.

Mr. Cheney told the assembly that "goodness overcame evil that day," adding, "All humanity can see you experienced bottomless cruelty and responded with heroism."

Mr. Clinton said: "Oklahoma City changed us all. It broke our hearts and lifted our spirits and brought us together." He also drew chuckles when he said of the damaged elm known as the Survivor Tree, "Boy, that tree was ugly when I first saw it, but survive it did."

A lone bagpiper, Frank Ward, was to lead the way to the memorial. But as he left the church, he tripped, stumbled and fell down the stairs, kilt flying.

Then, in a moment that caught the spirit of the day, the crowd broke into applause as Mr. Ward got back on his feet and huffed up his pipes.

A sprinkling of New York City fire and police uniforms populated the crowd, emphasizing the bond that has grown between the two very different places because of their similar tragedies. Standing by her daughter's chair, Mrs. Needham recalled how she had also gone to New York to help out after the terrorist attacks.

"I have to thank God for the experience I have had," she said. "It's a bond that maybe you wish you didn't have, but you do have. And you have an obligation to share.

"I'm afraid we'll have more opportunities to share," she added. "It's very heartbreaking."



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Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Under the crucifix that was carried before him, Pope Benedict XVI, "a simple, humble worker in the Lord's vineyard," blessed pilgrims from his balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square

German Cardinal Is Chosen as Pope
By IAN FISHER

VATICAN CITY, April 19 - Roman Catholic cardinals reached to the church's conservative wing on Tuesday and chose as the 265th pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a seasoned and hard-line German theologian who served as John Paul II's defender of the faith.

At 5:50 p.m. in Rome, wispy white smoke puffed from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel where the cardinals were meeting, signaling that the new pope had been chosen, only a day after the secret conclave began. His name was not announced until nearly an hour later, after the great bell at St. Peter's tolled, and the scarlet curtain over the basilica's central balcony parted and a cardinal stepped out to announce in Latin, "Habemus papam!"

"Dear brothers and sisters," Cardinal Ratzinger, 78, said, speaking Italian in a clear voice, spreading his arms wide over the crowd from the balcony. "After the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in the Lord's vineyard." He announced his name as Benedict XVI.

The unusually brief conclave seemed to suggest that Cardinal Ratzinger was a popular choice inside the college of 115 cardinals who elected him as a man who shared - if at times went beyond - John Paul's conservative theology and seemed ready to take over the job after serving beside him for more than two decades.

It was not clear, however, how popular a choice he was on St. Peter's Square. The applause for the new pope, while genuine and sustained among many, tapered off decisively in large pockets, which some assembled there said reflected their reservations about his doctrinal rigidity and whether, under Benedict XVI, an already polarized church will now find less to bind it together.

"I kind of do think he will try to unite Catholics," said Linda Nguyen, 20, an American student studying in Rome who had wrapped six rosaries around her hands. "But he might scare people away."

Vincenzo Jammace, a teacher from Rome, stood up on a plastic chair below the balcony and intoned, "This is the gravest error!"

Pope Benedict's well-known stands include the assertion that Catholicism is "true" and other religions are "deficient"; that the modern, secular world, especially in Europe, is spiritually weak; and that Catholicism is in competition with Islam. He has also strongly opposed homosexuality, women as priests and stem cell research.

His many supporters said they believed that the rule of Benedict XVI - a scholar who reportedly speaks 10 languages, including excellent English - would be clear and uncompromising about what it means to be a Roman Catholic.

"It would be more popular to be more liberal, but it's not the best way for the church," said Martin Sturm, 20, a student from Germany. "The church must tell the truth, even if it is not what the people want to hear. And he will tell the truth."

While Pope Benedict's views are upsetting to many Catholics in Europe and among liberal Americans, they are likely to find a receptive audience among the young and conservative Catholics whom John Paul II energized. His conservatism on moral issues may also play well in developing countries, where the church is growing rapidly, but where issues of poverty and social justice are also important. It is unclear how much Cardinal Ratzinger, a man with limited pastoral experience, and that spent in rich Europe, will speak to those concerns.

Born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, he was the son of a police officer. He was ordained in 1951, at age 24. He began his career as a liberal academic and theological adviser to at the Second Vatican Council, supporting many efforts to make the church more open.

But he moved theologically and politically to the right. Pope Paul VI appointed him bishop of Munich in 1977 and appointed him cardinal in just three months. Taking the chief doctrinal job in 1981, he moved with vigor to squash liberation theology in Latin America, cracked down on liberal theologians and in 2000 wrote the contentious Vatican document "Dominus Jesus," asserting the truth of the Catholic belief over others.

Despite views his opponents consider harsh, he is said to be shy and charming in private, a deeply spiritual and meditative man who lives simply. "He's very delicate, refined, respectful," Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, a retired top Vatican official who had worked closely with Cardinal Ratzinger, said in an interview on Tuesday night. "He's very approachable. He's open to everyone."

With their choice, cardinals from 52 countries definitively answered several questions about the direction of the Roman Catholic Church at the start of its third millennium.

They did not reach outside Europe, perhaps to Latin America, as many Vatican watchers expected, to reflect the growth of the church there and in Asia and Africa, prompting some disappointed reactions from Latin America on Tuesday. They did not choose a candidate with long experience as a pastor, but an academic and Vatican insider. They did not return the job to Italy, which had held the papacy for 455 years before a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, was elected John Paul II in 1978.

They also did not chose a man as young as John Paul II, who was only 58 when elected. Cardinal Ratzinger turned 78 last Saturday, the oldest pope chosen since Clement XII in 1730. This has led to some speculation that cardinals chose him as a trusted, transitional figure.

John Paul was virtually unknown when he was selected, but Cardinal Ratzinger's record is long and articulate in a prolific academic career, followed by a contentious tenure as John Paul's doctrinal watchdog. Most cardinals know him well from visits to Rome, and he won admiration among many colleagues for his crucial role in administering the church in the last stages of John Paul's illness.

In many ways, the cardinals picked John Paul's theological twin but his opposite in presence and personality. Where John Paul was charismatic and tended to soften his rigid stands with human warmth, Cardinal Ratzinger is bland in public and pulls few punches about his beliefs.

President Bush on Tuesday recalled the cardinal's homily at John Paul's funeral, saying, "His words touched our hearts and the hearts of millions." Speaking in Washington, he called Benedict a "man of great wisdom and knowledge."

Only on Monday, as the cardinals attended a Mass before locking themselves inside the Sistine Chapel to select a new pope, Cardinal Ratzinger took a moment as dean of the college of cardinals and celebrant of the Mass to repeat his fears about threats to the faith. In retrospect, some observers said, he was laying out what may be the focus of his papacy.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism," he said at the Mass. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards."

Cardinal Ratzinger has often criticized religious relativism, the belief - mistaken, he says - that all beliefs are equally true.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires," he added.

In his brief, first address as Benedict XVI on Tuesday from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, he did not speak of theology or of a specific direction for the church.

"I am comforted by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and act even with insufficient instruments," he said. "And above all, I entrust myself to your prayers."

Benedict XVI had dinner on Tuesday night with the other cardinals at the Santa Marta residence, built by John Paul II to provide more comfortable lodgings for cardinals while locked down in the conclave, said Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the chief Vatican spokesman.

He is to be installed in a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica on Sunday.

The conclave that selected him on the fourth ballot was among the shortest of the last century - the shortest, the election of Pius XII in 1939, took only three - and the speed caught many experts by surprise. Cardinal Ratzinger has been a divisive figure within the church, and reports before the conclave spoke almost unanimously about blocs of more progressive cardinals lining up against him.

In theory, cardinals are not allowed to discuss the inner workings of the conclave, but in reality, details seep out later. Several cardinals are expected to give interviews or news conferences on Wednesday, and may provide some limited glimpses in the dynamic that picked Cardinal Ratzinger - and with such speed.

But already, there was at least one voice of careful reservation. Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium, one of the most liberal cardinals, who has been critical of Cardinal Ratzinger, skipped the dinner specifically to hold a news conference.

He would not disclose his own vote and did not criticize Cardinal Ratzinger directly. But he was not effusive in his praise, either, saying that he had "a certain hope" based on the choice of the name Benedict. Benedict XV, who appealed for peace during World War I, "was a man of peace and reconciliation," Cardinal Danneels said.

But, he said, "We have to see what's in a name."

He also warned that being the spiritual leader of one billion Roman Catholics was different from parsing out theological matters.

"When you are a pope, you have to be the pastor of every one and everything which happens in the church," he said. "You are not specialized."

But Cardinal Edward M. Egan, archbishop of New York, said Tuesday that the process involved a "certain amount of tension and concern" but that the conclave made the right choice.

"I believe that the Lord has something to do with it," Cardinal Egan said at a news conference here. "This man is going to do a splendid job."

Asked if Cardinal Ratzinger would adopt a harsher tone as pope, Cardinal Egan asked a reporter: "Why don't you and I get together in one year and we'll talk about it. I have every hope that the tone is going to be the one of Jesus Christ."


Elisabetta Povoledo of The International Herald Tribune and Jason Horowitz contributed reporting for this article.



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German Catholic News Agency

Joseph Ratzinger, right rear, and his brother, Georg, in July 1951 after their ordinations, with their mother and father, Maria and Josef, and their sister, also named Maria, in Freising, in Bavaria

A Theological Visionary With Roots in Wartime Germany
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

ROME, April 19 - The man who has become Pope Benedict XVI was a product of wartime Germany, but also of a deeply Roman Catholic region, Bavaria.

As the Nazis strengthened their stranglehold on Germany in the 1930's, the strongly Catholic family of Joseph Ratzinger moved frequently among villages in rural Bavaria.

"Unemployment was rife," he wrote in his memoir, "Milestones." "War reparations weighed heavily on the German economy. Battles among the political parties set people against one another." His father, he wrote, was a determined anti-Nazi.

The Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled, was his bulwark against the Nazi regime, "a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit."

But he could not avoid the realities of the day. In an episode certain to be scrutinized anew, Joseph Ratzinger was briefly and unenthusiastically a member of the Hitler Youth in his early teens, after membership became mandatory in 1941, according to a biography by John L. Allen Jr., who covers the Vatican for The National Catholic Reporter.

In 1943, he and fellow seminarians were drafted. He deserted in 1945 and returned home, but was captured by American soldiers and held as a prisoner of war for several months, Mr. Allen wrote.

Along his way to the papacy, he built a distinguished academic career as a theologian, and then spent nearly a quarter century as Pope John Paul II's theological visionary - and enforcer of strict positions on doctrine, morality and the primacy of the faith.

In addition to his subtle and powerful intellect lies a spiritual, almost mystical side rooted in the traditional Bavarian landscape of processions, devotions to Mary and small country parishes, said John-Peter Pham, a former Vatican diplomat who has written about Cardinal Ratzinger.

"It's a Christianity of the heart, not unlike that of the late pope's Poland," he said. "It's much different than the cerebral theology traditionally associated with German theology."

His experience under the Nazis - he was 18 when the war ended - was formative in his view of the function of the church, Mr. Allen said.

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism," he wrote. "In other words, he believes the Catholic Church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."

Totalitarianism, indeed, critics might say.

They cite a long list of theologians Cardinal Ratzinger has chastised for straying from official doctrine; his condemnation of "relativism," or the belief that other denominations and faiths lead equally to salvation; his denunciation of liberation theology, homosexuality and feminism; his attempt to rein in national bishops conferences; his belief that the Second Vatican Council of the 1960's, which led to a near-revolutionary modernization of the church, has brought corrosive excesses.

In effect, he has argued for a purer church at the expense of size.

Hans Küng, one of the theologians who ran afoul of him, has called his ideology a "medieval, anti-Reformation, anti-modern paradigm of the church and the papacy."

"To have him as pope will be considered by many Catholics to mean that the church is absolutely unable to reform itself," he said, "and that you are not to have any hope for the great process of the Second Vatican Council."

Along with Bavaria and Nazism, a third influence helped shape the new pope: the leftist-inspired student unrest of the 1960's at the dawn of domestic German terrorism. He said it made him realize that, sometimes, there is no room for discussion.

Even before becoming the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger wielded immense power. John Paul appointed him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the former Holy Office. It was a deeply personal choice, made without his usual wide consultation.

Their regular Friday discussions were said to be often freewheeling.

The cardinal expanded the power of the role, ruling on a wide range of subjects. He was the first professional theologian in the job in more than a century, one equipped with a strong intellect and decisiveness.

"This is a man who can deal with a lot of difficult material without becoming upset," said the Rev. Augustine Di Noia, who was the under secretary of the congregation.

John Paul was said to have given Cardinal Ratzinger wide latitude; some called him the "vice pope." Other Vatican officials have suggested he served as a lightning rod, diverting criticism from the pope.

As dean of the College of Cardinals, he was also the most powerful of them - their leader in the period after John Paul's death, the celebrant of his funeral Mass and their guide during the conclave.

Behind his fearsome reputation lies a "a simple person," Father Di Noia said. "He chuckles. There's a simple childlike quality to him." Others speak of his dry sense of humor and modest demeanor.

He is a diminutive man with deep-set eyes and white hair, and speaks Italian - the language of the Vatican - with a strong German accent. Unlike John Paul, he had little time for sports or strenuous activity, other than walks in the mountains.

Until now, he lived in a small apartment near the Vatican and walked to work. He was perhaps the best-known cardinal, appearing at Vatican news conferences and known to many through his books and profiles of him in newspapers.

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn in Bavaria, the youngest of three children. It was a part of a region long within the orbit of Salzburg, in Austria, Mozart's birthplace. A pianist, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed a great love for the composer.

Partly because of his father's opposition to the Nazis, he wrote, the family moved four times before Joseph was 10. His mother was a hotel cook.

He entered the seminary in 1939. After conscription, he served in an antiaircraft unit. He has said the unit was attacked by Allied forces in 1943, but he did not take part in that battle because a finger infection had prevented him from learning to shoot. After about a year in the antiaircraft unit he was drafted into the regular military, sent home and then called up again before deserting in late April 1945, according to Mr. Allen. He told Time magazine in 1993 that while stationed near Hungary, he saw Hungarian Jews being sent to death camps.

In discussing his war experience, Mr. Allen wrote that he publicly expressed little of the explicit horrors that were around him; of the resistance to the Nazis by groups other than Catholics; or of the anti-Semitism of a prominent great-uncle.

In the fall after the war ended in 1945, he returned to the seminary, where his brother, Georg - who was soon to be a prominent church music director - was also enrolled. The brothers were was ordained in 1951; two years later Joseph Ratzinger earned his doctorate at the University of Munich. His dissertation was titled "The People and House of God in St. Augustine's Doctrine of the Church." He earned his teaching licentiate in 1957.

One of his most influential books was an early work from his university lectures, "Introduction to Christianity." He also wrote "Dogma and Revelation" and "Eschatology."

In his view, the church does not exist so that it can be incorporated into the world, but so as to offer a way to live. It is not a human edifice but a divinely created one. And theology is not a dry academic exercise. Theologians should support church teaching to serve the faithful, not depart from it.

His career as an academic began immediately after he was licensed. He spent two years teaching dogma and fundamental theology at the University of Freising and 10 years at the University of Bonn. He also had stints at the universities Münster and Tübingen. Alienated by the student protests at Tübingen, he moved to Regensburg in 1969.

In a 1985 interview with The New York Times, he called the protests "a radical attack on human freedom and dignity, a deep threat to all that is human." Such actions taught him, he said, that to discuss terror was to collaborate with it. "I learned where discussion must stop because it is turning into a lie and resistance must begin in order to maintain freedom."

Already in 1962, at 35, he achieved prominence at the highest levels of the church. A mutual acquaintance introduced him to Cardinal Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne. Cardinal Frings asked him to serve as his expert assistant at the Second Vatican Council. Father Ratzinger was credited with pushing Cardinal Frings to join French and other German bishops in standing firm against the Vatican Curia members who wanted to hold back council reforms. He also helped write a speech criticizing the Holy Office, the predecessor to his future home, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The speech called it outmoded and a "source of scandal to the world."

Yet within a decade he came to express deep worry that the church was drifting to the left and losing its ecclesiastical rigor.

In 1977, Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich, and made him a cardinal in just three months. That same year, he met the future John Paul II, although some have said that they might have met at the Second Vatican Council. They both spent their youths under totalitarianism, but they also had a feeling that the church was adrift in a permissive sea, and that there was a need to return to the fundamentals.

John Paul appointed him to the doctrinal congregation in 1981. Soon, he was taking action against liberation theology, the Marxist-inspired movement of priests in Latin America to help the poor by radical restructuring of society. The congregation denounced the movement in 1984; Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian liberation theologian, was summoned and silenced for a year.

Other theologians were chastised. Charles E. Curran, a theologian at Catholic University of America, was barred in 1986 from teaching at a Catholic institution for refusing to recant his challenge to church teaching on sexuality. The Rev. Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lanka theologian, was excommunicated in 1997 after being accused of challenging fundamental Catholic tenets like original sin and the Immaculate Conception. More than a dozen others have been disciplined by the congregation.

With the end of the cold war, Cardinal Ratzinger turned his attention to fighting "relativism." His congregation's 2000 declaration "Dominus Jesus" - "Lord Jesus" - said other religions could not offer salvation, and were "gravely deficient." An uproar from other religious leaders followed, but John Paul publicly defended the document.

Even as he celebrated the Mass leading into the conclave on Monday morning, Cardinal Ratzinger called relativism a "dictatorship" under which the ego and personal desires are paramount.

One of his major efforts, which many say has been successful, was to sap national bishops' conferences of power - and even here he harkened back to the war. The German conference issued "wan and weak" condemnations of Nazism; the truly powerful documents, he said, "came from individual courageous bishops."



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Yahoo Gains Users and Sales as Profit Soars
By SAUL HANSELL

Yahoo, the big Internet portal, said yesterday that its profit doubled in the first quarter, as its audience grew rapidly and advertising sales grew even faster.

Yahoo reported that 372 million people visited its network of sites in the quarter, up 36 percent from a year ago. Yahoo asserts that 13 percent of time spent online is spent on its search, e-mail and other services.

As a result, the company has been a primary beneficiary of the increased interest among advertisers in using the Internet, both for text ads on Web searches and in more elaborate graphical advertising.

Yahoo earned $205 million in the first quarter, up from $101 million a year earlier. That comes to 14 cents a share, including a penny a share from investment sales and legal settlements. Analysts had expected Yahoo to earn 11 cents a share.

Yahoo's total revenue was $1.17 billion, up 55 percent from a year ago. Analysts like to look at Yahoo's revenue after deducting the payments it makes to sites that carry its ads, like Microsoft's MSN search service. On that basis, Yahoo's revenue was $821 million, higher than the $797 million that analysts expected.

The company's international growth was especially vigorous. The company's revenue outside of the United States was $355 million, up 124 percent. Its domestic revenue was $819 million, up 37 percent.

Yahoo's advertising revenue, after deducting the payments to other sites, was $672 million, up 50 percent. While the company does not break out the sources of its advertising, Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Company, said he believed Yahoo benefited especially from an increase in spending by major national brands on graphical advertising.

"They are catching up with Google on search," Mr. Rashtchy said. "And they are especially strong in branded advertising."

Yahoo released its results after the close of normal trading. In after-hours trading, its shares increased by $1.64, to $34.86. In regular trading, shares rose 67 cents, to $33.22.

Yahoo's fee-based business - like enhanced e-mail service and its dating service - grew even faster than advertising, posting $149 million in revenue, up 61 percent. Yahoo has 8.9 million paying customers, 53 percent more than a year ago. It said it expected 11.5 million to 12 million paying customers by the end of the year.

Over the rest of the year, Yahoo will introduce a series of activities meant to expand its fee income, said Terry Semel, Yahoo's chief executive. It will introduce a new music service and will vastly expand the services it offers through mobile telephones, especially outside of the United States.

"For Yahoo there is a great opportunity to connect to users beyond what they do on the PC," Mr. Semel said in a telephone interview.

Yahoo's cash balance increased to $3.9 billion, up $110 million. And that does not include $751 million in other investments, largely its holdings of stock of its rival Google. The cash balance increased even though Yahoo bought $315 million of its stock and spent $54 million in cash on acquisitions.



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L'Osservatore Romano via Reuters

During the mass, Benedict XVI set out some of the themes of his papacy in conciliatory language.

Pope Benedict Sets Out Papal Goals in First Public Mass
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
and IAN FISHER

VATICAN CITY, April 20 - Pope Benedict XVI today used his first papal Mass to send a message of openness and reconciliation to his Roman Catholic followers, to other Christian churches and to "everybody, even those who follow other religions or who simply look for an answer to life's fundamental questions and still haven't found it."

He said that like his predecessor John Paul II, his "primary task" would be to work toward "the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers," and added: "Theological dialogue is necessary."

It was a striking shift in tone from a mere two days ago, when he entered the conclave in the Sistine Chapel as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a theologian who had served for the last 24 years as the often-feared chief interpreter - and enforcer - of Roman Catholic doctrine. In a homily just before the conclave began on Monday, Cardinal Ratzinger had denounced what he called a "dictatorship of relativism" and "new sects" that indoctrinate believers through "human trickery."

However, today, on the first full day of the new papacy, many of the cardinals who elected Benedict appeared to be engaged in an effort to both explain their decision and to transform his image from authoritarian doctrinal watchdog to humble servant and pastor.

Several cardinals gave news conferences and many agreed to interviews, describing the new pope as "compassionate," "collegial" and "shy." All seven American cardinal-archbishops appeared at an unusual news conference in Rome this morning and in similar language tried to introduce the world to a different side of the new pope.

"We just have to be very careful about caricaturizing the Holy Father and very simply putting labels upon this man of the church," said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles. "I've already seen some headlines in our country doing that. And I think that's a mistake."

They explained that Benedict had been chosen in a relatively speedy four rounds of balloting because of his brilliance as a theologian, his deep spirituality and his ability to communicate the faith with clarity.

"The vision that some have of the Holy Father is someone who is not interested in dialogue. That's a skewed vision," said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, D.C. "I believe you will find in the papacy of Benedict XVI a good deal of consultation, a good deal of collegiality."

He added that Pope Benedict was "someone who has been one of the great exponents" of the Second Vatican Council.

"When he was head of the Doctrine of the Faith, he had a particular task to do, which was to uphold and make sure the traditions of the church, doctrinally, morally, were upheld," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, archbishop of Westminster, England, in a separate news conference. "Now that he is pope it is an entirely different concept altogether. Now he is Peter for the whole church."

The problem of Benedict's public image and the contrast with his warmer predecessor was summed up in a front-page cartoon in Corriere della Serra, Italy's most respected newspaper. It assumed that readers remembered John Paul II's now-famous introduction as pope from the basilica balcony in August 1978.

"I do not know whether I can express myself in your - in our - Italian language. If I make mistakes," he added, beaming and endearing himself to Italians, "you will correct me."

The cartoon showed Benedict at the same balcony looking out at the crowds. "And If I make a mistake, woe to you if you correct me!"

Meantime, the Vatican began introducing Benedict XVI to the world through television: It released video of the new pope, dressed in a white cassock and skullcap, as he walked into the papal apartments. He sat down at his new desk, and with a black marker, signed his new name to a sheet of paper. The video also showed him greeting cheering Vatican officials, and getting out of a grey papal car.

The Vatican also gave a brief description of his first full day as pope: In the morning he visited his former staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he headed until the death of John Paul. He ate lunch with members of the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy. He also visited the apartment where he lived until now, on Piazza della Citta Leonina, a few blocks from the Vatican.

On Friday he will visit again with all the cardinals in Rome. Then on Saturday, he is expected to meet with journalists. A Vatican official said it had not been decided whether he will answer questions, though both John Paul I and John Paul II did respond to some questions during similar meetings with journalists soon after their elections.

On St. Peter's Square, with no more smoke to watch for, the bustle of the two days of the conclave had settled down to normal. Souvenir shops had not yet stocked the usual run of papal souvenirs the prayer cards, rosaries, statuettes, postcards with the image of Benedict, though owners assured the few customers who asked that it would only be a few days.

One shop facing St. Peter's Square did have copies of his photograph, large and small, and Jim Roccio, 66, from Johnstown, Pa., managed to buy the last one before they sold out this afternoon. Mr. Roccio, a travel agent who calls himself a moderate Catholic, said he was happy to hear that Benedict was working to soften his image.

"From things I read about him, I had my doubts," said Mr. Roccio, who was in St. Peter's Square when the election was announced. "But watching him on the balcony, his first words that he wanted to be humble I thought he was reaching out saying that 'I might have had some different opinions, but know I know I am not just a cardinal.'

"To me, that's what appeals to me right now," he said. "He's not saying: 'Here I am, you have to take me as I am.'"

On the square, two young German Catholics writing postcards in front of the basilica said they were thrilled at a new German pope, especially one, like them, from Bavaria. But they too said they hoped that Benedict's efforts to reach out were sincere.

"In the past he was a conservative," said Hans Reichhart, 22, who grew up about 40 miles from the town where Benedict did. "But I hope that he changes his mind to the time before he came to Rome, because he was a progressive. I hope that he will bring new life to the church."



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